Now a Canadian company has developed a cleansing technology that may one day capture and remove some of this heat-trapping gas directly from the sky. And it is even possible that the gas could then be sold for industrial use.

Love it.

Should the cost of capturing carbon dioxide fall low enough, the gas would have many customers, he predicted. Chief among them, he said, would be the oil industry, which buys the gas to inject into oil fields to force out extra oil.

Does anyone else find anything ironic about the fact that most of the CO2 cleansed from the air would then be used to extract more hydrocarbons for us to burn, thus filling the air with more CO2? Still, it’s an improvement despite the irony — we’d probably burn that new oil anyway, so scrubbing some of the previous pollution before we do it is a net gain.

Gas capture would be extremely important in developing a rational price for carbon emissions, said Dr. Fox of the British mechanical engineering society. “Whatever it costs to take it out of the air and store it away,” Dr. Fox said, “that’s the price polluters would pay if they want to put carbon into the air.”

Bingo. Large industries would no longer be able to complain the value of carbon is arbitrary in a cap and trade program.

I am a former aerospace research engineer who has committed to teach high school physics in the urban schools of Boston. This is a journey... I fully expect my views and opinions to change and evolve over time. I speak for no one but myself.